java, the gplining. - Single Point of Failure

java, the gplining.

So parts of java will be gplv2 plus some extra stuff. This seems like a neat thing, at least according to those that deal with java. Personally I've had some really bad experiences with trying to administer servers to serve java application stacks, as well as trying to cope with packaging issues around java software. So I'm kind of burned and not able to formulate a good opinion on it.

Thankfully Red Hat has acquired some pretty smart java folks that will know better what to do with this gift from Sun. What this might mean for Fedora is still up in the air. It really depends on what parts get opened up and when,. I've heard that some pieces are open now, and some are scheduled to be open in March of '07. Obviously the latter is a bit beyond the schedule for the next Fedora release, but the parts that are open now, well I don't really grok how all the little java bits fit together but it is something the Fedora governance will be looking into. Red Hat (and Fedora) does most of its java packaging upstream at jpackage.org, so it will be interesting to see how things change there and filter into our package sets.

So, no answers right this moment, but something we're keeping on the radar for this release or the next one.

NOTE I just realized that what I said could make it seem like we had no java people before getting Jboss. I really didn't mean that, we had and still have a very strong java team. I have great respect for them and their ability to bring some sanity to that which is Java.